A Change of Vector
by cofax
Summary: Thirty cycles, to bring him to this place.


Title: A Change of Vector  
Author: cofax  
Email: cofax7@yahoo.com  
Distribution: Already submitted to Leviathan; everyone else  
please let me know  
Spoilers: The Premiere, The Hidden Memory  
Disclaimer: not mine, no money changing hands  
Summary: Thirty cycles, to bring him to this place.  
Notes: Set at the end of the pilot. A change in the speed or  
direction of an object is a change in vector. Beta by  
Vehemently and Melymbrosia.  
  
Feedback makes me do the wacky. Send it to cofax7@yahoo.com.  
  
  
***  
  
  
A Change of Vector  
by cofax  
October 2001  
  
  
The bridge was silent but for the whispers of techs at their  
consoles. If Bialar Crais listened very hard, he imagined he  
could hear the ticking as the Frag cannon cooled off, three  
levels down and far forward. Lieutenant Teeg stood at attention  
beside him, her face blank; about him the bridge crew went about  
their business, as quiet and efficient as ever.   
  
The glossy black surface of the command console reflected back  
Crais's own face, dark with unspoken rage. The viewscreen and  
the holographic projector both remained determinedly empty but  
for the nameless planet spinning below. The Leviathan was gone,  
and with it the Human.  
  
Teeg shifted, and cleared her throat, but said nothing. As  
aides went, she was acceptable. Ambitious, effective, athletic  
in bed, and not too proud to serve under a recruit if it got her  
what she needed.  
  
She expected him to crack; he was, after all, only a recruit,  
and they had just failed spectacularly to capture both the  
escaped Leviathan and his brother's killer. Peacekeepers were  
pragmatic, and felt revenge was wasted effort -- but recruits  
were not known for their pragmatism, or their competence. The  
lauded heroism of Sub-Officer Dacon was a long time in the past.  
  
For a long moment, Crais allowed his gaze to rove over Teeg's  
controlled blonde perfection, not saying a word. As expected,  
she neither spoke nor flushed.   
  
But that wasn't control: that was arrogance, the cold senseless  
pride of those born to service.   
  
Born to service. As he was not.   
  
Born and raised in the creches on the largest Command Carriers,  
on the stations, on the Leviathans. Born to the knowledge, born  
to the comradeship. Born to their ranks, or so it had seemed to  
him for much of the past thirty cycles.   
  
Lieutenant Teeg and her kind had had it easy. She had not been  
yanked from her soft bed at thirteen and thrown into the bloody  
hothouse of the pre-classification testings. She hadn't been  
raised to shovel manure and think of wealth in terms of  
livestock and forage, rather than plasma rifles and planetary  
systems. Teeg had never been hungry, or scared. She defied  
nothing, sacrificed nothing to be where she was; and she had no  
family but the service.  
  
Captain Barlon didn't have to score higher than ninety-eight  
percent of the trainees merely to get the chance to fail  
tactical training. Didn't have to dodge the slurs of his  
yearmates, dispel the doubts of his instructors, in order to get  
his commission. Didn't have to learn a new writing system from  
scratch, a new technology, a new way of thinking, a new slang.   
It was in Barlon's bones, as easy as breathing.  
  
Even Crais's own renegade Officer Sun had never curled herself  
into a corner of her bunk and chewed her lip til it bled, the  
night before the final series of genetic tests. She'd never  
feared being classified as a tech, or worse, a server, little  
better than a manual laborer. She knew she was going into  
Commando training -- she was born to service, wasn't she?  
  
None of them would have sponsored Tauvo into Commando training,  
just to have someone around who would understand. Who would  
know *why* it mattered so much that he was captain of a Command  
Carrier. That three thousand soldiers, four hundred Commandos,  
two dozen Marauders, and fifty Prowlers answered to *him*. To  
Bialar Crais, born in the mud of a drelnitz farm: the first  
recruit to make Captain in three hundred cycles.  
  
Tauvo knew, and was proud of him, as their parents never would  
have been. Their parents, who had been ignorant and soft,  
dirt-grubbers from the day they were born until the day they  
died. They'd never have understood why Crais had mounted the  
heads of three Hynerian resistance leaders in his quarters.   
They'd never seen a wild Leviathan banking through the sixteen  
rings of Mialsa VII, or the volcanoes at dawn on Pedsen-Kar.   
  
Tauvo knew, and understood, and cared. Tauvo would have  
understood the fire inside him, the rage. The need to crush  
this Human under his boot like a Tarsian slivnot, to smear his  
brains across the polished floor.  
  
But Tauvo was gone.   
  
All Crais had now was a ship full of cold soldiers like Teeg,  
and no one to understand the subtle puns Fellish allowed, no one  
to wink at him from the sub-officer's table in the commissary:  
no one to remind him of why he wanted to be here in the first  
place. Here where war was clean and everyone was well fed.  
  
Tauvo was gone, and Crais could feel the dirt under his nails.   
He let his fingers curl into fists. Thirty cycles, to bring him  
to this place. Thirty cycles of curbing his tongue, losing his  
accent, learning to kill.   
  
Peacekeepers were, above all, practical. Revenge didn't further  
the service.   
  
"Lieutenant."  
  
Teeg straightened even more, if that were possible. "Sir?"  
  
Thirty cycles of his life, and only just now discovering he  
wasn't really a Peacekeeper after all.  
  
"Set a course for the Uncharted Territories."  
  
  
***  
  
END  
  
Notes: thanks, again, to Vehemently, who salvaged this, and  
Melymbrosia, who (again ) made me justify my choices. Any  
errors or inconsistencies are to be laid at my door, not theirs.  
  
  
  
  
  
=====  
I'm the darkness in your daughter  
I'm the spot beneath the skin  
I'm the scarlet on the pavement  
I am the broken heart within   
--- Yes Virginia I am ---  
cofax7@yahoo.com http://cofax.freeservers.com 


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